Search Results

“... and had reverberations on the Continent because of hostility there towards the Jesuits. Zagorin may go too far in attributing dissimulation to some of the occultists, libertines and unbelievers whom he sees hiding behind esotericism (Sir Walter Raleigh is a case in point), but his central thesis of the pervasiveness of dissimulation in 16th and 17th-century ...”

“... directing for viewers, others will object to no titles at all, because that’s equally imperious. Richard Artschwager remarks: ‘The word “Untitled” is already a loaded apparatus. I consider a title as another kind of paint. Or an art material. The title is a trimming. It can’t be ignored. If you do, you’re making rules for viewers of what to ...”

“... The thorough understanding of a difficult text, even of one written in one’s own language, may be made far easier by a good commentary. Eliot himself provided, if not a commentary, useful notes upon The Waste Land, and an Oxford don, John Fuller, has written an excellent commentary on Auden’s poems. In the case of a text written in an ancient language, a commentary is particularly useful ...”

“... offshore island otherwise describable as the landmass of Europe and Asia is that by so doing one may avoid all direct contact with the English literary establishment, which I have nonetheless managed to enter with the publication of a novel called Wales’ Work.1 In Paris, where I have lived even longer than Graham Greene, avoiding literature is not ...”

“... The practice of ‘blacking up’, which has died out in the surviving forms of the morris dance, may in fact have had its roots in the pagan ritual of smearing ash on the face, and the elements of battle mime may have originated in vegetation symbolism based on the battle of the seasons. But it is clear that by the 16th ...”

“... my men and boy friends, has been the one guiding principle in my life, and has inspired anything I may have been vouchsafed to accomplish in the nature of the influencing or the building up of character. There may be many comrade friends, there can only be one comrade wife.’ ‘His very sexlessness,’ Crawford ...”

“... the chairman corrected her. ‘ “Mr Harold” has.’ Here, in a nutshell, is the theme of Richard Davenport-Hines’s book. Its early chapters form a heroic chronicle of upward social mobility. We first encounter an earlier Daniel Macmillan as a mid 18th-century crofter, scratching a living from the desolate but sublime landscape of the Isle of ...”

“... If, that is, a ‘memory’ is some kind of private mental property. The picture I have of her may be faintly tinted by first-hand experience, but its contours come from public documentation. Through biographies, critical writings and the tourist phenomenon of her home at Charleston, Vanessa has become a cultural commodity, and it’s this commodity I ...”

“... true to his promise that he would move there in October 1883 ‘in whatever condition the premises may be’. One party of casual passers-by, seeing workmen and open doors, took a look inside and were surprised to find Gilbert in residence. Contemporary photographs show dark, elaborate interiors in which dramatist and architect (Harold Peto took 7 Collingham ...”

“... There is, as Richard Graves points out, no general biography of Housman. The books about him by Laurence Housman, Grant Richards and Percy Withers are valuable, because these men knew Housman and could describe him: but they are not biographies. George Watson’s A.E. Housman: A Divided Life is more like one, but it is not quite one; of Norman Marlow and Maude Hawkins I say nothing ...”

“... autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have still, my name written in it by a friend, as I disliked my handwriting then as I do now. It was a detailed, allusive book, demanding a more thorough knowledge of 18th-century politics than a schoolboy could be expected to have, but I ...”

“... to a better way of life? What right have you to condemn them to a primitive life? … The Penans may tell you that … is what they like. That is because they are not able to live a better life like the other tribes in Sarawak … Stop being arrogant and thinking that it is the white man’s burden to decide the fate of the peoples in this world. As the ...”

“... the mental space of diaries at large. But let it be admitted first that whatever else a journal may or may not be good for, it is a good subject for the attentions of an editor. By definition attuned to the private and familiar (and to perceiving them as familiar), the journal necessarily calls for the services of an ...”

“... Richard Rorty has made us familiar with the distinction between two sorts of philosophy, which he calls ‘systematic’ and (I think infelicitously) ‘edifying’. The first sticks to the central epistemological tradition, which assumes that it can deal systematically and progressively with reality; the second is essentially of the periphery, and its exponents are pragmatical opponents of the institutional tradition ...”

“... political life which its leaders advocate, and of which there are some signs? The answers Richard Sakwa and Alexander Yakovlev give to these questions are discouraging, even where they are not meant to be. The shift in the politics of Russia which followed the December elections is very marked; it is also, as usual, murky. On one level, the result ...”